Jinsider

R abbi Sidney Kleiman of the historic Congregation Adereth El will be celebrating his 98th birthday later this month. He is both the longest-serving and oldest active congregational rabbi in the United States. Rabbi Kleiman, now Adereth El’s rabbi emeritus, has served the congregation since 1939. We caught up with him for this special occasion.

W ith the New Year season upon us, authors are crowding the morning talk shows to hawk their new self-help books. Take those talking heads as you may, some of the best self-help comes from our own Jewish wisdom. To offer practical Jewish advice, we asked the always profound and prolific Rabbi Joseph Telushkin to offer us a perspective and insight for the year ahead.

Is the institution of marriage on the verge of extinction? Referring to declining marriage rates and changing views toward marriage in the United States, a recent cover of Time magazine asked: “Who Needs Marriage?” What is the Jewish perspective on this important community issue?

L ast week, Google, in conjunction with a research team based at Harvard, released a new online tool called the Ngram Viewer that tracks culture through the words of 5.2 million books (4 percent of all books published). They call the quantitative analysis of this vast amount of data “culturomics,” a new research method in the humanities, linguistics and social science. JInsider test-drove the Ngram viewer (which can be found at www.culturomics.org) using Jewish/religious terms to evaluate how often a word or...

With Mark Madoff’s suicide over the weekend, we witnessed the burden of a father’s sins. The Madoff family’s tragic narrative reinforces why a person’s legacy truly matters. To expand on this teachable moment, JInsider looked to better understand personal legacy through the perspective of Jewish wisdom. (See full video discussions on www.jinsider.com.)